Perian - play most video formats in QuickTime for free | TUAW

The veritable ocean of available video formats can often instigate a confusing and frustrating adventure in hunting for plugins and explaining to grandma why that DivX email forward she received plays the audio, but not the video. Fortunately, instead of bookmarking the plethora of codec download pages and backing up loads of installation disk images, a new plugin called Perian brands itself as a "swiss-army knife for QuickTime," as it aims to help solve all our video format woes. Perian supports an impressive list of codecs, including DivX, XviD, 3viX, FLV (y'know, those Flash files you can save but can't play because Adobe's Flash player doesn't seem to install an actual GUI front end?), AVI, and much more. Of course, you still need Flip4Mac if you have to play WMVs, but it looks like Perian can have you covered for most of the other formats you (and grandma) might encounter in your journey across the internets. As an upcoming bonus for Democracy Player users, Perian will be included in the next version.

Perian is offered for free from Perian.org, though I can't track down any system requirements or whether it works on both Mac and PC.

Thanks Rick

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Source: http://perian.org/

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The veritable ocean of available video formats can often instigate a confusing and frustrating adventure in hunting for plugins and...

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Lee Taylor

It seems the download link is down or been pulled?
I even tried the apple site and a couple of other places which had it avaiable and can't get it.

October 22 2006 at 4:05 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ed Kohler

This is really a huge improvement over how plug-ins are handled today. Thank you, Perian!

October 18 2006 at 2:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

MikeCP

For what I use OS X for, this software is a savior and once it reaches 1.0, should be linked to from the Apple page. Being able to play nearly every video format in Front Row is something I've wanted since day one. I also would rather not have to switch between quicktime and vlc. I'm a happy customer.

October 02 2006 at 4:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rae

Unfortunately, this seems to mess up the audio in some WMV9-encoded AVIs I have that previously worked fine w/ Flip4Mac.

Meh.

October 02 2006 at 2:18 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

donovan

Anyone else having trouble mounting the disk image? I keep getting 'not recognized'... ?

October 02 2006 at 1:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

pnarse

It doesn't work in iTunes :(

It won't allow me to drag .avi files into the library so it doesn't even attempt to play the file (which, of course, it would now quicktime can if iTunes wasn't being so goddamn stubborn!)

October 02 2006 at 1:10 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Grover

Let's clarify that while being able to play all these formats in QT makes it THEORETICALLY possible for all QT based programs to open (for example) a Xvid encoded .avi, this does not mean that all QT based programs suddenly have this ability. The programs still have to be made to acknowledge that these files exist.

iTunes will still not accept .avi files natively. I've yet to find a way to change this.

While it is indeed nice to have an all in one download that takes care of all of this, there's nothing here that you couldn't have done before downloading individual components.

October 02 2006 at 10:54 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tried most of the links...they ALL downloaded as .dmg files (no .dmg.bz2 or anything else).

Still, every one gives me the 'corrupted disk image' message upon trying to open.

October 02 2006 at 10:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris E

Does anyone know how to jump forward and back 10 secs or 1 minute in Quicktime? I use this all the time in VLC, and its the one thing that keeps me from moving to QT fulltime.

October 02 2006 at 5:27 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

henrrrik

If you get a file with the ".dmg.bz2" extension, just rename it as ".dmg" and it will work.

October 02 2006 at 12:46 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply